One of the professors, Kim Knowlton, is now one of my colleagues at NRDC. She’s continuing to study the public health impacts of climate change, and I’m continuing to learn from her about the myriad implications of global warming for human health, as well as the health of our communities.
This week, the nation’s top environmental health journal published a new study by Kim (excuse me, I should say Dr. Knowlton in this context) and several of her colleagues here at NRDC and at the California Department of Public Health. The report in Environmental Health Perspectives looks at the record-setting July 2006 heat wave, which affected large swaths of North America. (Along with Knowlton, the study’s authors include Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, Galatea King, Helene G. Margolis, Daniel Smith, Gina Solomon, Roger Trent and Paul English.)
The 2006 heat wave struck parts of central California especially hard, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with soaring daytime temperatures that barely cooled off overnight, providing residents with no relief from the sweltering heat for nearly two weeks. Sacramento, for example, experienced 11 consecutive days of triple-digit heat "This event impacted California's economy, energy supply and health," NOAA scientists reported. More than 160 deaths were blamed on the heat in California, and more than 200 died nationwide.
It's no surprise that heat waves can kill -- especially in areas such as the central coast of California, where residents are used to milder conditions. (Think of Mark Twain’s widely repeated but apparently apocryphal quote about the coldest winter he ever experienced being a summer in San Francisco.)
The 1995 Chicago heat wave, chronicled in Eric Klinenberg’s book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, killed more than 700 people, mostly the elderly poor who lacked air conditioning or anyone to check on them. In the summer of 2003, an intense heat wave was blamed for an estimated 35,000 deaths across large swaths of Europe, partly because it struck during August, when many doctors were vacationing outside the major cities. Both examples point toward the important role of social nets and the public health care system -- and what can happen when they break down.
What's different about this new study by Knowlton and her colleagues is that it goes beyond mortality, also documenting the thousands of people who got sick as a result of the 2006 heat wave. From July 15 through August 1 in California, the study reports, hospitals saw more than 16,000 additional emergency room visits and nearly 1,200 additional hospital admissions. The heat-related ailments ranged from diabetes to cardiovascular diseases to acute renal failure.
As might be expected, children and the elderly were at the greatest risk. An accompanying economic analysis shows that the increased hospitalizations and health care needs cost California’s economy more than $133 million dollars. (See NRDC's press release about the study.)
It’s always important to point out that it’s difficult to blame any one particular extreme weather event on global warming. But the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it’s likely that heat waves have already become more frequent over most of the world due to climate change and that they’ll continue to grow in intensity, causing more heat-related illnesses and deaths.
I found it particularly interesting to read NRDC's findings this week because I had just finished The Ghost Map, a great book by science writer Steven Johnson about London's 1854 cholera outbreak. Johnson chronicles an investigation by maverick physician John Snow and clergyman Henry Whitehead, which demonstrated that contaminated water was the source of the outbreak, despite the leading theory that said disease was spread by smell.
Snow's work is considered a watershed moment in the development of public health as a science. (You may have heard it condensed as the story of how the pump handle to the Broad Street well was removed, arresting the course of the epidemic.) The “ghost map” of the book’s title, which showed that the deaths were largely dependent on proximity to the Broad Street pump versus other sources of water, was something that Snow created not to solve the case -- he had already amassed sufficient proof for his theory -- but to make the case to others.
Perhaps the most significant part of Snow and Whitehead’s work was convincing the nascent public health officials of the day that something needed to be done about contaminated water (it seems amazing that they needed to be convinced, but then again, no one knew about the existence of germs and bacteria yet). Their efforts ultimately resulted in one of the greatest building projects in London’s history: a sewer system that flushed contaminated water out of the city and away from drinking water supplies, eradicating cholera from London.
NRDC’s work on global warming and health has a similar aim: not just documenting the impacts of climate change, but looking for ways that communities can do something to cope with them. Heat wave early warning systems and methods for helping vulnerable populations -- think the “cooling centers” that some cities open during warm spells -- are already being used in some places. Knowlton and her colleagues urge public health officials to consider other measures, as well.
NRDC has been tracking selected global warming “hot spots” -- places across the world where climate change is already having an impact on human health -- as well as locations where communities have taken steps to cope with the changes. You can learn more about NRDC’s global warming and health program and explore the hot spots map at our website.
]]>Sunday’s New York Times was something of a bonanza (albeit a sobering one) for anyone interested in environmental news. In a front-page story, Elisabeth Rosenthal reports from Barcelona on the swarms of jellyfish that are stinging beachgoers in increasing numbers all over the world. “While jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen,” she writes, “for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world’s oceans.”
As readers of the Los Angeles Times’ excellent Altered Oceans series (which won last year’s Pulitzer for explanatory journalism) are aware, environmental damage to the earth’s oceans is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms in the sea, as well as killing larger marine species and sickening us humans. Jellyfish are stepping (oozing?) into the void left by their overfished predators such as tuna, sharks and swordfish. Rising sea temperatures caused by global warming and oxygen-depleting pollution are also helping the jellies, which the East Coast Times calls “the cockroaches of the open waters” because they thrive in damaged environments where most other species suffer.
The jellyfish boom is just more evidence that our planet’s environmental crisis has unexpected -- and often unpleasant -- consequences. Sometimes it’s not easy to relate to concerns about elevated CO2 levels in the atmosphere, or even the plight of the polar bear as sea ice melts, because those things seems so distant from our everyday lives. But the impact of global warming can also be felt very close to home, like when we go to the beach and find it full of stinging jellyfish, which happened to vacationers in Long Beach, N.Y. (and even participants in the recent New York City triathalon).
On our website right now, NRDC outlines some of the other consequences of global warming and delves more deeply into what it could mean for our health. And you can learn a lot more about the many threats facing the earth's oceans and what can be done to protect them at youroceans.org.
A report by Felicity Barringer in the Times’ National section offers “sobering production figures for those hoping that fuel prices can be lowered” by increased drilling for oil on public lands. Barringer writes:
The Bush administration, in its effort to expand energy production, has issued more than three times the number of well-drilling permits on Western lands as in the Clinton administration’s last six years. But oil production in that region during the Bush years is 12 percent below average levels from the Clinton era, according to federal data.
The piece goes on to detail the “palpable” environmental effects of the increase in federal drilling permits on public land in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
The expansion of the energy industry has subdivided parts of western Wyoming and western Colorado into a rabbit warren of wellheads and roads. The Pinedale, Wyo., area had its first ozone alerts last winter, thanks to a combination of factors: natural gas flaring from scores of wells, increased vehicle traffic associated with drilling activities and seasonal temperature inversions. One study showed that the mule deer herd that migrates near Pinedale declined by nearly half from 2000 to 2005.
For NRDC’s take on the environmental consequences of drilling on public lands and more productive and immediate solutions to our energy crisis, check out the materials featured in the Oil & Energy section of nrdc.org.
Finally, "Our Towns" columnist Peter Applebome takes readers on a jaunt to Sag Harbor, N.Y., where the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum is featuring an exhibition on the indispensable fuel of the 1700s and early 1880s: lamp oil made from boiled whale blubber. Applebome asks: “Is the oil business the new whaling business? And, if so, is that a good sign or a troubling one?
Bear with us. Whaling, after all, was one of the world’s first great multinational businesses, a global enterprise of audacious reach and import. From the 1700s through the mid-1800s, oil extracted from the blubber of whales and boiled in giant pots gave light to America and much of the Western world. The United States whaling fleet peaked in 1846 with 735 ships out of 900 in the world. Whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the United States; in 1853 alone, 8,000 whales were slaughtered for whale oil shipped to light lamps around the world, plus sundry other parts used in hoop skirts, perfume, lubricants and candles.
Applebome makes the point that at the height of whale oil’s dominance -- and even in its declining years -- few people could imagine a world without it, and Big Whaling mocked its potential competitors. Sounds an awful lot like the way many of us think about fossil fuels today. And yet as soon as something better came along -- kerosene -- whale oil bit the dust within a couple of decades (although it left behind massive environmental consequences).
The point being that the energy source we’re so dependent on today need not be the energy source of tomorrow, and that change can happen more rapidly than many of us think.
NRDC has been urging Americans to move beyond oil and build a new economy powered by clean energy that offers new jobs and new opportunities. When looked at in light of the whale oil story, it makes you realize that change is not only possible -- it’s inevitable. The trick is to push for the kind of change that makes our economy, our country and our world a brighter place.
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